online, 8 students max

Techniques of Revision is a five-week workshop and course that digs deep on the actual techniques and practice of revision. We’ll do this in three ways: through a skillshare among students, through looking at other students’ work with an eye toward revision, and through actually taking time together to revise our own work and talk about the

experience. Throughout, we’ll try to focus less on general philosophies of revision or at lists of “rules of good writing,” but as far as is possible on revision as a practice. This may include studying actual techniques of mark-making and managing changes on files (Track Changes, copyediting marks, and different tools of writing both by hand and digitally), how we preserve and make use of older drafts and layers of revision, how we make large late-stage changes to characters and plots, and how we even assess the need for revision in the first place. If this were a painting class, it would be a class on brush technique.

Who should take this class?

There are spots for eight students. My request is that you each have some kind of WIP draft of prose (fiction, nonfiction, or anything in between.) It doesn’t have to be “complete,” but you should feel like it’s at an advanced enough stage that you’re seriously starting to think about what you might need to do to revise it.

What do we do in class?

Each student will get 40 minutes of workshop time, and we’ll workshop two students per week. The first week, which will be shorter, starts with students introducing themselves, talking about their work in progress, and identifying some of the issues they specifically want to work through with revision. We’ll end with a 25-minute session of revising with one another, followed by a short check-in about how everyone notices themselves approaching their process. The first week’s class will run about 90 minutes.

The second through fifth weeks each follow the same structure, with each class lasting around 150 minutes (including five-minute breaks between sections):

- 25/5 minutes of skillshare on a set topic,

- 40/5 minutes of workshop (student a),

- 40/5 minutes of workshop (student b),

- 25/5 minutes of revising together, followed by a check-in about how this is going.

The order of skillshare topics will be:

Week 2: Revising sentences

Week 3: Revising for flow within paragraphs

Week 4: Revision for flow within sections

Week 5: Deep structure and character revisions to a draft

Skillshare discussion will be structured around two questions: (1) how do you, personally, know that there’s a problem with this part of your writing? And (2) once you’ve identified problems, how do you, personally, start to address them? (I’ll lead these discussions and offer some of my personal techniques along with the techniques and practices students are already using.)

What will students do outside of class?

Before the workshop, students should deliver a writing sample of 5,000 words MAXIMUM. The writing sample should be in 12-point font with standard margins, double-spaced, and should include before the text a brief summary of points about their project that the author is specifically concerned about as they head into revision.

Each student in the course will provide a craft letter as feedback. This should acknowledge and respond to the points the writer made, and it should include at least some reflections about how the student might start to address those points were the text their own. The goal isn’t to “correct” the writer’s text, but to give the writer a set of options, recommendations, and strategies to consider before ultimately choosing their own path.

Each student should also have their work in some kind of form that they can work on revising, side by side but individually, during the closing half hour of each class.

About the Instructor

Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, as well as The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald. She is the coeditor of the Ignatz Award-winning We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, as well as the copublisher of Instar Books and the cohost of the World Trans Forum open mic series in Brooklyn. She has been a teacher for the Sackett Street Writers Workshop since 2017 and has previously taught for Tin House, One Story, and Lambda Literary. More information is available at jeannethornton.com.

Student Testimonial

"Our writing will never be the same."--Jeanne's fiction students at the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat

Techniques of Revision, 5 Sessions with Jeanne Thornton